“What do you do for a living?” they ask. I never know how my response will go over or which questions will follow. Most often, the questions are, “How did you get into that?” and, “where do you get your recipes?” On a recent flight, I got a bold, “How do you make money doing that?!” from my seat mate. All fine questions, mind you.
I never have a good answer to the recipe source question. Typically, the recipes are a composite of ideas from restaurant meals, magazines, other blogs, cookbooks and suggestions from friends and readers. Sometimes I wake up with ideas; sometimes they pop into my head when I open my refrigerator; sometimes they come to me when I’m deep in conversation during happy hour. I always try my best to give credit where credit is due.
Today’s recipe is more straightforward—it’s from an old issue of Gourmet Magazine that I’ve been wanting to try forever, courtesy of a special edition from Bon Appetit… cross-referenced with America’s Test Kitchen’s vegetarian cookbook and fiddled with to meet my expectations. That’s pretty straightforward for me these days. I finally got a chance to try it when I came across some big, juicy, local tomatoes at Whole Foods. I knew just what to do with them and flipped open my sources when I got home. America’s Test Kitchen wanted me to chop up the tomatoes and let them marinate for up to three hours, but I was hungry-bordering-on-hangry, and a three-hour wait wouldn’t do.
Gourmet’s version suggested grating a portion of the tomatoes to get some nice and juicy pulp, then letting the mixture marinate for 10 minutes. Much better! I mixed up the sauce and let it rest while I brought a pot of water to boil and cooked my pasta. Both sources suggested simply tossing the raw tomato sauce with hot cooked pasta, but I thought it was a little too raw in that state, a little too what’s pico de gallo doing in my pasta, if you will. I wasn’t sure the pasta was blog-worthy until I tried my reheated leftovers. They were amazing. I took that as inspiration and tried just barely cooking the fresh tomato sauce while tossing the pasta with a little bit of starchy cooking water. That was just the ticket—the tomatoes benefit from a little warmth, and the starchy cooking water turns the raw tomato runoff into a sauce that lightly coats the spaghetti. Granted, this recipe’s flavor will be almost entirely dependent upon the tomatoes you use, so pick some good ones. You want ripe, almost over-ripe tomatoes. You can, of course, skip my suggestion to warm up the sauce and just toss it with warm pasta for Italian-flavored tomato pasta. Last but not least, I felt like Parmesan added quite a bit of personality to this dish, but check my notes for substitution suggestions. Let’s hear it for ripe summer tomatoes!
Tomato surplus? Here are a few tomato recipes that will use them up:
Tomato Basil Bruschetta with Balsamic Drizzle Easy Tomato Salad Heirloom Caprese Salad Baked Eggs on a Bed of Roasted Cherry Tomatoes Mediterranean Tomato and Feta Dip
